I have written a report of my experiences at the KDE booth of the Paris Linux Expo 2002. "Then I saw this magic thing: A live coding session by a truly talented KDE core developer: David took his laptop and started coding under my eyes. In five minutes, it was done: the "URL" label on Konqueror would accept a pasted URL and simply open it. Really great! He did that again on the next day, when a visitor asked for the domtree plugin to support copy/paste of every branch." You can also view photos of the event thanks to Laurent Rathle, webmaster of the excellent kde-france.org site.

Comments

DCOP was a big hit along with webdav support. The X guys even gave us two thumbs up for the use of XRender. The only saveing grace about the show was we did get a significant amount of traffic, and most systems there seemed to be running KDE.

Granted I was only there on Wednesday, so things may have gotten better but everyone please give Mandrake Software and the Etherboot guys a big hand for bailing us out and helping us get on the network and provideing a power supply for my laptop so I could do the dcop demos.

Maby SuSE and TT will be there next year, but I wont hold my breath....

Gerunds are commonly formed with an "ing", thus "fucking" rather than "fuckin". The proper pluralization of "countrys" is "countries". Nationalities are capitalized in english, thus "american" is incorrect and should be "American".

Now that we have established /your/ ignorance, I believe the individual was referring to the subject of this thread and merely stating that he was glad that the recent convention in the USA had some positive factors to its credit.

To be precise we established his ignorance concerning american (English?) language. To be fair we should need to know how his english compares to your second or third language. This is anyway off topic, yes his manners were all but appropriate, yes most americans confuse USA border lines with the world ones.
Renato

:: To be fair we should need to know how his english compares to your second or third language.

English is my second (third, if you count Latin) language. And my fifth is moving along quite nicely.

:: his manners were all but appropriate

Agreed - he slammed someone for a quite possibly misinterpreted statement. My take on the statement was quite different - that of an individual giving praise to all concerned (look at the subject of the thread to see why he would have made an encouraging, positive statement about the US based LinuxWorld).

:: most americans confuse USA border lines with the world ones.

Having lived in the USA for quite awhile now, I have not seen any more ignorance than any other country has... merely the common contradictory "we're the best/people are dumb" sentiment held throughout the world. The uneducated of every country are (due no doubt to a variant of Murphy's celebrated law) often the loudest and thus very embarrasing. Sure American media is dominated by American issues. I doubt that any news agency anywhere runs updates on landslides on Mons Olympus. Luckily, there are NHK and BBC radio streams if you want news with your choice of regional focus.

Regardless, this *IS* off-topic. My email is available if you wish to discuss this. I only responded because of the vicious nature of the reply to what appeared to me to be a positive statement. I'll always come to the defense of a good-intentioned person who is being harassed.

On Thursday Jonathan ran KDE on his G4 laptop. That and Christopher Molnar's machine generated a significant amount of interest.

Immediately after the first wave of conferences got out on Thursday morning (around 10:30am), the booth got very busy. George, Jonathan and I were kept busy answering questions much of the time. Traffic was very high and didn't relent until close to 6pm. I think it went pretty well!

I'm definitely interested in doing NYC Linuxworld next year. However, I'll help make damn certain we have a proper booth setup. Next year if the following print collateral isn't designed and available I'll make it:

- Brochures. People were often looking for these, and they're great to bring back to the boss.
- CDs. This was a popular request on Thursday.
- Booth posters and such. Something to dress up the booth, make an impression for those not yet familiar with KDE.
- Local directory of KDE-friendly consultants. If a business wants to consider KDE then we should be able to have a directory they can take with them.

Yes we definitely have to have those things. It was almost embarassing. Especially since Ximian/Gnome bought out as much of the good realestate at the show as they could. I got a real "talking-to" by the HP guys because of our lack of promotion at the show, and in general in North America. Most of the people at the show preferred KDE to Gnome or other desktops, but we just don't seem to have any working promotional infrastructure in North America.

We also need to have:

- Decent hardware
- A more formal demo (Actually, couldn't we now script this with dcop too? That would be nice)

Sean: Friday was busy and it was amazing when it just "suddenly" ended at 4:00 and I realized that I had missed lunch! The KDE booth was particularily busy with some guys keeping me talking for as much as an hour straight.

I'll try to send out an email to the list(s) about all the development and non-development issues that were mentioned to me on Thursday and Friday.

Always remember older booths and try to learn something on what could be improved. Follow this simple rule and the next booth will even be better :-)

Sean Pecor said (see above) already a few good things that could be done at FOSDEM. If time is too short to arrange them for FOSDEM, just use them for the booth after that.

Something different:
I was thinking maybe we should make a KDE CD. Put the sources on it and the binaries (yeah... I know, KDE doesn't provide binaries...) and other useful stuff. A CD can be distro specific: e.g. a Mandrake KDE CD and that could create a way to let Mandrake sponsor those CD's. :-)

Everybody happy... the user gets his KDE, KDE gets more users, and the distro that helped us gets attention too

Yes, we should probably keep a page somewhere relating how to make a successful booth, with things that will draw attention from the visitors and give them some incentive to get concerned about KDE.

Gerard had many copies of a sheet of paper presenting briefly the project and asking help for translation. All people would first take the sheet and read, and then come to us to speak. Or they would stop to read the paper and then I would come to talk to them. Else, they probably wouldn't have stopped. So having a small brochure is very helpful.

The big K poster and the T-shirts were visible and attracted people too. We should not hide. :-)

We had no demo of advanced feature, but we should definitely prepare something for the FOSDEM. We will have to show Gnome and GnuStep developers what you can do with an "advanced" desktop!

We will have to show Gnome and GnuStep developers what you can do with an "advanced" desktop!

So you are going start coding for Gnome? Dont you like KDE "Kiddy Desktop Environment"?

KDE looks slick acts sick. Once KDE 3.0 is released you can wait 6 months later and KDE 4.0 will show up. KDE is only good as a KDE development tool. Maybe someday you will realize that Bob Businessperson "ME" sees this as a put-off. We see once every three years with MS as a pain. KDE will Kill KDE. Overwork your maintainers and they will quit. Stay a moving target and business people wont even look at you.

Sorry, but your arguments don't make much sense. It doesn't matter if KDE versions are released fairly often, since binary compatibility between running desktops is maintained (given that you have compatibility libraries installed).

Also, the time span between releases is several years, not six months. About the same time span exists between major releases of GNOME and GnuStep as well, and only a slightly larger one (about 50% larger) between major sub-releases of the Linux kernel, and major releases of XFree86.

KDE really isn't a moving target, and it certainly is useful as more then a KDE development tool; I use it for several hours every day, typing code for various projects in various languages (Konsole is a godsend), browsing the net with Konqi, listening to music, etc.

Constructive critisicm is good, but please back up your arguments some more.

At my previous job, all the developers came to work were from Windows world, and not a single developer knew about Linux..

I installed to them 2 demo machines - both machines with Red Hat 7.2 - one of them is running Gnome & one is running KDE (and KDevelop). Guess which desktop enviroments they wanted on their 60 workstations? (KDE)

I told the management that KDE is a very fast developing desktop enviroment - but it will be fully backward compatible - they took it with open hands.

I love those t-shirts as well. Just a question. Couldn't it be possible to buy t-shirts to support the KDE-project. I saw on the pics that a shirt was 13 euros. So I say ... I give 30 euros to the kde-project ... can I get one of those T-shirts? (Yes I know I could do some shirt-printing myself .. it is just an idea ...)

Fab

ps I live in The Netherlands ... so if it could be done ... let me know :-0

Discussing with David Faure, I told him about some complaints I had about Konqueror : the profile setting should be in the settings menu and the URL bar should accept URL drop by replacing the current URL. Then I saw this magic thing: A live coding session by a true talented KDE core devloper : David took his laptop and started coding under my eyes. In five minutes, it was done: the "URL" label would accept url and just open them. Really great! He did that again on the next day, when a visitor asked for the domtree plugin to support copy/paste of every branch. Really great.

What is reassuring is that he hasn't done anything I wasn't able to do. He just did that a lot quicker.
-> he types quicker
-> He knew exactly which file to open
-> he had the function after three seconds
-> he had to open the qt help for whatever reason
-> he already knew how to use KURL
-> he patched
-> it compiled just fine.
-> it ran just fine.

That's why this a maybe an idea ... Maybe we can find an T-shirt printer webshop who decides to make KDE-shirts and give a portion back to the kde project.

Or .... maybe there should be a some talking about logistics and funding for this kind of promo material. I personnaly think this could be done by people who are not programmers but end users of the KDE project who would like to contribute besides translating or mouth-to-mouth advertising.

There is enough artistic material that could be used to make some nice shirts or so .... Maybe some people of KDE promo could seriously look at this idea ...

Actually...on www.kde.org I found there's a guy selling KDE T-shirts but what was more interesting is that everyone can do it.

He's using http://www.cafepress.com service that alows anyone to upload their images for T-shirts or whatever merchandise they want and they do the rest (print, process, ship and send the cheques). The service itself is free. Every item has a base price that covers their expenses, but of course you are free to raise it. Difference is a profit that they send you.

So, with help of kde-artists and kde-league, you could set up a risk-free promotional shop for KDE that could make a buck or two for the project.

Not only that, importing T-Shirts (or, as the customs people said, 'cotton products') can cause you some problems: there are certain limitations on importing 'cotton products' into the EU, the taxes are high and you may have go personally to the customs office and sign some declaration of the cotton's origin. Not using a business address when ordering them seems to help though.

OK. But it would be nice if there was a collection of images that was suited for printing on T-shirts. Then it would be up to an individual to take care of how to get that on a T-shirt.

Right now, if you are like me without an artistic talent, you have only few choices. Either you buy an old T-shirt with KDE1 design or you can take that posted picture and have it printed on T-shirt. Although the picture itself is very nice, I feel a bit odd to announce that KDE is coming to a desktop near me, if it's already on every computer around me. So a collection like that would be great.

I know this picture is used in the CVS KSplash but now I can see it on my KDE 2. I wanted to try Beta 2 but this pc is low on speed and disk space :-( The binaries would be helpful, but I'm using RedHat (until the new Mandrake comes out) and they don't provide the beta rpms. :-(

i read this site only randomly, so maybe what I have to say is already outdated:

Is there a possibility for normal KDE-Users to help you guys at the booths by funding, say, some posters or PR-stuff like Promo-CDs and stuff like that?
I'm not really into C++ development ( I'M A JAVA MAN !!! ), so I can't do anything productive for KDE ... but as KDE needs better PR (IIUC) this semms to be a good idea.

You do not need to be a developer to manage a KDE booth. Lof of visitors do not know exactly what KDE is, or have a specific interest and only want to see how KDE matches it. So being a concerned user is far enough to answer many questions. After, for the specific development question, you can redirect the visitor to a developer.

So yes, you can help the KDE booth by simply being there, giving ideas, bringing some demonstration material, bringing some equipment, sharing your successful experience with KDE, encourage people to switch, promote free software, explain what benefit helping KDE could bring, ...